America’s monster | Our Corner

I’m not sure when it happened, but I recently realized I’ve stopped asking myself, “What are we going to do about mass shootings and gun violence in this country?”

Instead, I now ask, “When is the carnage going to come to Enumclaw?”

It’s not even an “if” in my head – it’s a “when,” because is there any reason why we should be lucky enough to be spared? Have we really prepared ourselves enough, as individuals and as a community, to prevent a mass shooting on the Plateau?

I watched “Murder on the Orient Express” last night with my wife.

Unfortunately, you’re about to hear some spoilers. Sorry.

Here’s the gist: Detective Hercule Poirot finds himself on a moving train when a gangster is murdered, and Poirot believes he could have only been killed by someone on the train.

Throughout the movie, Poirot discovers everyone else on the train is somehow connected to the gangster, and more specifically to one particularly heinous crime he committed, and had a motive for killing him.

But Poirot just can’t make the puzzle pieces fit together — there was always a clue or a fact that didn’t work with whatever theory he had.

So, as Poirot’s creator Agatha Christie wrote, “Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory — let the theory go.”

Poirot’s answer to his mystery, like the answer to ours, must encompass all the facts.

And with some 300 million guns in this country, it is estimated more people have died via gunfire — homicide, suicide or accident — between 1968 to 2011 than the death count of American soldiers in every war the U.S. has ever been involved in, Politifact verified.

Take all these facts into consideration. Can you stop gun violence from coming into your community? Into your life?

Some people say yes.

After the Sutherland Springs shooting, President Trump responded to a question about “extreme vetting” of gun buyers, saying from a podium in Seoul, South Korea, “If you did what you’re suggesting, there would have been no difference three days ago, and you might not have had that very brave person who happened to have a gun or a rifle in his truck go out and shoot him and hit him and neutralize him…. If he didn’t have a gun, instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.”

It’s true that when Stephen Willeford shot Devin P. Kelley, he probably stopped many more deaths.

But that line of logic only goes so far before it gives way to the “just-world fallacy,” the idea that good things will happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people, and if we just prepare well enough, we can keep ourselves, and our loved ones, happy and healthy and alive.

The flip side of this fallacy is that when bad things happen to good people, we think somehow, they must have deserved it.

The NRA and our president applied the same logic to mass shootings and gun violence.

The message the American public received, after the methodical murder of 26 people, was, “Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. Why aren’t you armed?”

We all share a responsibility toward making our country safe for every one, but it’s the government’s responsibility to lay down that foundation in law, a responsibility our elected leaders have abdicated and set squarely on our shoulders.

No single solution – not gun bans, “extreme vetting,” a larger focus on mental health care, or increased spending on state and federal law enforcement and background check systems – will solve this problem, just like how arming yourself will not keep you, or your loved ones, safe from the terrorist. The mugger. The abuser. The child.

Even as a community, a society, we can’t turn this fallacy into a reality.

But we can certainly make it a bit more real.

As Poirot must hypothesize until he develops a theory that encompasses all the facts of his mystery, so must we work on a solution that solves not one or a few of our issues with guns, but all of them.

The work will be hard, even impossible – we’ll have to look hard at ourselves, our society, and determine what sacrifices we need to make, and whether they’re worth a little extra security and safety for not just us, but everyone.

And in the end, the solution won’t be popular. The correct answer, in its time, never is, and only later is it ever accepted as just and necessary.

But until then, we have to deal with a monster of our own making, and though it was born of reason, it has turned to madness.